The smart guys in the news media on the coasts laughed when Minnesota voters
elected Jesse "The Body" Ventura as governor. They dredged up
the old file shots of Ventura from his days as a professional wrestler,
but the 47-year-old Reform Party wonder, former mayor of a Minneapolis suburb
and radio talk show host who galvanized young and blue-collar voters with
his theme of "Retaliate in '98" did not shrink from his colorful
past.

After the returns showed he was indeed winning the race, the gravel-voiced
Ventura reportedly shouted to 1,000 supporters at a racetrack clubhouse
on election night, "They are not going to take the people lightly again."

Yes, Ventura had to back up on his promise to refund the state's $4 billion
surplus to the taxpayers, finding the money already has been spent. And
he decided not to rappel into the Capitol from a helicopter, as he promised
before the election. But his fans probably can live with those disappointments.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune quoted one of his supporters, John Markert,
a 46-year-old banker, as saying, "He won't get much done, but he's
going to shake up politics ... I think it's going to force the Republicans
and the Democrats to look at what's wrong."

Ventura, who was born James George Janos and grew up in blue-collar Minneapolis,
spent time riding with a motorcycle club in California after his honorable
discharge as a Vietnam-era Navy Seal. He changed his name because he liked
the California sound of "Jesse Ventura." He once worked as a bodyguard
for the Rolling Stones and frequently noted during the campaign that he
was the only candidate with a union card (Screen Actors Guild, from bit
parts in movies, including Predator). Now he has set about the serious
work of setting up an administration and submitting a state budget proposal
when he takes office on January 4.

Ventura shocked nearly everybody, possibly including himself, when he won
the three-way race against Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat-Farmer-Laborite
Hubert "Skip" Humphrey III by a vote of 37 to 34 to 29 percent,
respectively. He attracted a huge surge of new voters, many of them young
people, who showed up at the polls to take advantage of the Minnesota law
that allows voters to register to vote as late as election day.

Turnout for the Minnesota election was 61 percent, about 8 points higher
than the normal turnout for a mid-term election in Minnesota. And while
some suggested that Ventura scuttled Humphrey's election, exit polls showed
that he actually might have kept the office out of Republican hands, as
39% of the Ventura voters otherwise would have supported Coleman, 30% would
have supported Humphrey, and 28% of Ventura voters said they would not have
turned out if he were not on the ballot.

Ventura ran as someone who was not a career politician, who spoke the language
of working folks and would say whatever was on his mind. A vote for Jesse
was a poke in the eye and a chair over the head of the establishment while
the referee wasn't looking.

Ventura's positions may be described as fiscally conservative and socially
liberal with a libertarian streak. He's pro-choice on abortion and supports
domestic partnership benefits for gay couples. He's open to the legalization
of drugs and prostitution. But he's no progressive. He attacks "big
government," and calls for unspecified tax cuts to refund all budget
surplus to the taxpayers. He claims that class sizes can be reduced without
providing any additional money to schools through "more efficient use
of funds." His popularity among college students came despite his opposition
to state aid for college students (he says they should work their way through
college). He also opposes state subsidies for day care and "socialized
medicine."

"I don't think [outgoing Republican Gov.] Arne Carlson and I are that
far apart politically,'' Ventura told the St. Paul Pioneer-Press,
suggesting that he would stay with Carlson's moderate course for the foreseeable
future. But he also has consulted with moderate former DFL U.S. Rep. Tim
Penny and Dick Lamm, the former three-term Democratic governor of Colorado
who challenged Ross Perot for the presidential nomination of the Reform
Party in 1996. Ventura named as his transition director a former aide to
Penny.

"I will do the best job I am capable of doing,'' Ventura promised.
He said he is not anti-government, and knows he will have to compromise
with the Legislature, which has a Republican House and DFL Senate, to get
anything done. To keep in touch with the people, he suggested he might do
regular radio call-in shows from the Governor's Office.

But when asked by the Associated Press what he has to say to the lobbyists
looking to make a connection, Ventura replied, "Nothing."

MINNESOTA MADE Ventura's race possible because it provides matching
funds for candidates who get more than 5% of the vote. Because Ventura was
getting much more than that in the polls, he was able to get a bank to loan
him $300,000 so he could run TV ads in the last two weeks of the campaign.
Ventura hired Bill Hillsman, who created the humorous and highly effective
ads that helped U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone upset Rudy Boschwitz in 1990.

One of Ventura's ads showed two kids playing with the "Jesse Ventura
action figure" who battles with the "special interest" man.
In another ad Ventura wore nothing but boxer shorts, sitting in the position
of Rodin's "Thinker," while the narrator talks about Jesse "The
Mind" Ventura's positions. It ends with a close-up of Jesse's face
as he winks at the camera.

State laws also limited the major party candidates to expenditures of $2
million each, so they could not drown out Ventura's ads (although their
parties and allied political action committees were able to spend more).
Ventura spent an estimated $500,000.

Ventura's support was concentrated among younger, blue-collar voters, especially
men. He got 46 percent of the 18- to 29-year-olds and led among all age
groups under 60. (Humphrey won the over-60 group) and among all income groups
under $100,000 year (Coleman won the rich). Humphey led in the polls until
the last few weeks of the campaign. The polls measured the likely voters,
which underestimated the new voters who turned out for Ventura.

Ventura had no get-out-the-vote apparatus, but the drives mounted by the
major parties and the unions probably turned out lots of people who voted
for Ventura at the top of the ticket and who voted their party affiliation
or union-endorsed candidates for the lower end of the ballot.

The conventional wisdom was that Ventura would draw votes away from Coleman,
which is why Humphrey insisted that Ventura be included in all the debates.
But Ventura drew support from both major party candidates. And as neither
of the major party campaigns treated him as a serious threat, nor did any
of the political pundits.

Humphrey, the attorney general for 16 years and son of the late Vice President,
is well-liked in Minnesota and he recently beat the tobacco companies in
a big lawsuit, but he attracted little excitement.

Coleman is mayor of St. Paul, where he has a reputation as a basher of the
city workers unions, whose retiree health benefits he tried to slash. Coleman
was a protege of Humphrey and worked in the attorney general's office before
he was elected mayor as a DFLer. Then Coleman switched parties and started
courting the right wing. Because of his party switch, Coleman is widely
seen as an opportunist. But he is good-looking, polished and young and the
Republicans grabbed on to him as their ticket to keep control of the governorship.

Micah Sifry in the online magazine Salon wrote, "Ventura's election,
rooted in a majority of ballots cast by political independents, leaned distinctly
to the left. He won a full one-third of Democrats voting, compared to 28
percent of the Republicans. And he got 44 percent of self-identified liberals,
compared to just 29 percent of conservatives. What this shows is that the
Republican Coleman held on to more of his base, mainly by bashing gays and
harping on his pro-life position, while Humphrey experienced a near total
meltdown in the face of Ventura's working-class populism. If anything, Ventura
is Ross Perot with a happy face: sane, funny, self-deprecating, grounded
in the reality of average people's lives (not a secluded billionaire surrounded
by sycophants), a patriot but not a anti-foreigner demogague, a real libertarian
who never tried to buy a politician or get a government subsidy (unlike
Perot, who was a big donor to Nixon and other Washington insiders), focused
not on the painful politics of belt-tightening but on the good-times of
a budget surplus."

One political leader who takes Ventura very seriously and respectfully,
Sifry noted, is Paul Wellstone, the progressive senior senator from Minnesota,
who has also run and won two populist campaigns for office. (Not to mention
that he is also a longtime wrestler, albeit of the amateur college variety.)

"What I most appreciate about his campaign and victory is the downright
anti-establishment part of it," Wellstone told Sifry. "The message
was 'look, you gatekeepers who supposedly decide who can run, and who is
viable and who is serious and who can win--we're going to take you on.'
I like that. I also appreciate the political reform part [of Ventura's message],
which was very much for real." When Sifry told Wellstone liberals like
Los Angeles writer Robert Scheer wanted to "spank" Minnesota,
Wellstone replied "That's ridiculous. That's a huge mistake. That's
the same elitism that looks down on people, and gets liberals into big trouble
that they deserve to be in."

Wellstone added that he was looking forward to sitting down with Ventura's
staff and working together on areas of agreement, such as opposition to
corporate welfare, support for public schools and environmentalism. But
Wellstone said he looked forward to a "vigorous debate" in areas
where they disagree.

"In the meantime," Sifry wrote, "the genie is out of the
bottle--and the two major parties are going to have a hell of a time stuffing
it back in."